Social Networks Are Launching Apps for Their Real Customer: Business

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Social Networks Are Launching Apps for Their Real Customer: Business

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Tyson Goodridge

Foursquare has rolled out its first new app since it launched nearly four years ago, but you probably can't use it: Foursquare for Business is designed not for ordinary users but for the check-in service's advertisers and prospective advertisers.

As the old saying goes, if you’re not paying for a service, then you’re the product rather than the customer. The real customers of social networks like Facebook and Foursquare, then, are the advertisers, who are increasingly able to purchase ads as conveniently as sharing a status update or accepting a friend request. There is, in fact, an emerging competition to make life on social networks as convenient as possible for businesses large and small.

Foursquare's entry into this competition, Foursquare for Business, gives owners of restaurants, bars, neighborhood shops and other venues a convenient view, right in their Apple and Android phones, of which users have been visiting their establishments. It also lets owners post news updates, offer specials, and pore over analytics. The app is free to businesses.

You can’t use the new Foursquare app to buy ads, at least not yet. But such a capability seems likely, and that is where Foursquare will look to make its money. After releasing its own business app, Pages Manager, in May, Facebook took only five months to add a feature letting business owners purchase advertising right within the app, in the form of “promoted posts.”

“It’s been very successful,” Facebook advertising product director Gokul Rajaram said of Pages Manager last summer. “One of the biggest requests from page admins was they wanted to manage their page through the mobile app. They were not at the desktop all day, but they wanted to post multiple times a day.”

Sometimes the technology furnished to advertisers races ahead of that available to ordinary users. Facebook’s recently unveiled Graph Search tool is an echo of granular user-targeting systems available to ad buyers for years now.

Advertisers on social networks, it seems, are evolving just like the users on social networks: They are increasingly mobile and increasingly sophisticated in their approach to sifting through data. As more social networks start caring about profitability, they will inevitably churn out more products targeted solely at businesses, like Foursquare’s new app. Users should not be surprised if these apps outshine those made for the hoi polloi; those who pay the bills will tend to get the shiniest toys.